Corporation Mechanics 101

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This is a deprecated class syllabus, intended as historical record for the teaching department.


Class Information


General Information

This class is aimed at aspiring CEOs and Directors of corporations. We will look at the mechanics of creating a corporation, recruiting members, setting up member roles and titles and managing corporation assets. We will look at the mechanics of shares and voting. We will also touch briefly on the mechanics of war declarations.

  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Location: Docked up safely in a station

Class contents:

  • Creating a corporation
  • Recruiting members
  • Using roles and titles
  • Asset management
  • Shares and voting
  • War declarations
  • Standings
  • Joining an alliance
  • Closing a corporation
  • Q&A

Student requirements:

  • Mumble registration and access - make sure you have Mumble sorted out and operational well before the class begins:
  • Access to the Class.E-UNI in-game chat channel

Additional information: This class is primarily lecture delivered in the Class.E-UNI channel in Mumble, followed by Q&A.

Notes for the Teacher

Required materials:

  • Class.E-UNI chat channel, to receive questions and post relevant links
  • EVE University guide to Corp Mechanics

Class Contents


Welcome to this class on corporation mechanics!

This course is designed primarily for people who intend to create and run their own corporation and for future CEOs and Directors.

Over the next 2 horus or so, we shall cover corporation creation, recruitment of members, management of corporation assets, access rights, shares, voting and dividends, standings, joining alliances and war declarations. There will be an optional practical exercise at the end where we will use alt characters to walk-through the mechanics of setting up a new corporation.


We have a few ground rules for this class:

  • Feel free to type any questions in the Class.E-UNI chat channel as you think of them and I will try to answer them as we go along. At the end of my lecture I will cover any questions I missed as we went along and we'll open Mumble for any further questions or general discussion.
  • You should be docked up safely in a station.


Creating a corporation

Before you even start making the corporation, you must do some planning first. There are three things you should do before starting; who, what, and where. The who is deciding who will be in your corp. Will it be just you? Your friends? Or open to the public? These each require increasing levels of corp structure and complexity. What is deciding on what your corp will do. For a small corp, tax-dodging is usually enough. However as you grow larger you need a goal. For the University this is to teach new players and to get Ubercado corpses. You will also need to think of rules for your corp to fit your mission. Finally you need to choose your corp's base of operations. This depends much on your corp's mission, but it is usually a good idea to put your HQ somewhere in high-sec. Near a trade hub or mission hub is usually a good idea if your an industrial or mission running corp.

Now that you have the who, what and why; it's time to make the corp! First there are the requirements:

  • You must have the skill Corporation Management at level 1 or higher;
  • You must have 1,599,800 isk in your wallet;
  • You must be docked at a station. The station where the corporation is created will be listed as its Headquarters. Moving the Headquarters later is only possible under certain conditions (which will be covered below), so take a moment to consider where you will create your corporation;
  • You can quit corporation instantly even with roles by going right click on portrait in chat and choose quit corporation? and then confirm quit corporation.

(This has changed and required a 24 stasis period after role dropping in earlier versions.) If you are a CEO, you need to resign first (see below). (For completeness sake, you may also not have an active session timer. Since session timers only last 30 seconds, you can just wait it out if you encounter this.)

Once your meet the requirements, it's time to make the corp for real!

  • Choose a name and ticker. The name must be 50 characters or less, however the ticker may only be 5 characters. They both must be unique, so finding a ticker can be difficult. Note that the ticker will be seen alot in space (like the short name for the corp) so pick something you like.
  • Choose a logo. Make it look spiffy.
  • Set tax rate. You can set anywhere from 0-100%, but high rates will deter people from joining. 5-10% is the average rate.
  • Website. If you don't have a website, put a link to the recruitment thread in the forums if you have one.
  • Description. Give a general idea on what your doing. But remember everyone can see this, so don't be too specific.

Everything except the corp name and ticker can be changed later, so make sure your happy with those two.

Recruiting members

Recruitment is what lets your corp go, and as such you need to decide how you are gonna grow. First you need to set your policy. Who do you want to recruit? This is related to what your goal is. Mission runners for a mission corp, miners and industrials for an industrial corp. Next you need to decide how you want to recruit them. You can just let people come to you, or you can activity recruit in forums and chat channels. Then you need to decide how to process people. Just let them in or actually interview them?

One thing to remember is that the CEO's skills depends on the amount of people the corp can hold.

  • Corporation Management - Each level allows for 20 people. Rank 1 required to start a corp.
  • Megacorp Management - Each level allows for 100 people. Requires Corp Management V
  • Empire Management - Each level allows for 400 people. Requires Megacorp Management V
  • Sovereignty - Each level allows for 2000 people. Requires Empire Management V. Grand Total 12600 people.
  • Ethnic Relations - By default all corp members must be of the same race. This skill allows for 20% per level to be of a different race, up to 100%. Replaced by Diplomatic Relations in the Inferno expansion. Corp members can be of any race without skills.

You can update your member limit count by clicking the "Update with my Skills" in the edit details window of your corp.

Their are a few ways to find recruits for your corp. First is the forums. Post a post detailing your goal and objectives. You can also try the recruitment channel, however this is filled with many people spamming the channel and it is hard to stand out. Finally you can try in a system's local channel. Find a system where what you want to do is popular (missioning hub, trad hub for industrial) and recruit there.

Now that you have recruits, how do you process them? Well many people are subjected to background checks. Why? Well EVE is full of spies, and your recruitment officers are your first lines of defense. So how do you do this? First check his API key. You can use his API key to check his assets. If he has more cash than he should have, he may be an alt. You can also check his forum posts along with public killboards. He may have flown with one of your enemy corps or may have flown with many different corps, which may mean he's a spy. You can also interview the applicant, see if he would fit well in his corp. After you decide this applicant would be a good member of your corp, let him in!

Now what happens if you don't check on him? Well he may be a spy from an enemy corp, and could take your and destroy your corp. He could be a corp thief, and would take all your stuff. Or he could just be a plain-old griefer, and just be a douche. These things happen in EVE, and you need to be prepared to deal with them.

Using roles and titles

Titles can be used in a number of ways, the most common is in conjunction with roles to allow an easy way to give your management the powers they need to execute their duties.

Roles are in-game sets of privileges you can attach to titles or grant individually to corp members. A full list can be found here [1]. Roles come in two types, normal and grantable. Normal roles give the player those powers in the corporation. Grantable roles allow that player to also grant that role to other players. Grantable roles should only be used with trusted players. If you want to, you can attach roles to a title, and just give the title. This makes it easier to give roles.

If you checked the roles table, you may have noticed that some roles can change based on location. These locational roles allow you to have different people able to work on different bases. This is great if your corporation has many offices spread out over the universe.

Titles can also be used for pure vanity value. For example, I (Roxx Weltraum) have the "Fear his Therapeutic Might" title. It does absolutely nothing, it just looks cool.

Asset management

As a corporation you have stuff, and you need to manage your stuff. In order to have hangars to store stuff, you first need to rent an office. Offices are rented at stations for a monthly fee. This fee is dynamic, as it increases with the number of offices at that stations. The more offices, the higher the monthly fee. Once you've rented your office, you get seven hangars to do with as you wish. There is no limit to how many offices a corporation can have, however each station can only have 24 offices. If you also want to change your HQ you need an office at the station you want to move it to.

Also important to manage is your corporation wallet. Your corporation wallet has multiple divisions, each like a mini-wallet. You can designate each division for a specific purpose and give certain people access to only that division.

Shares and Voting

The shares system is a broken mechanic, however it does have power in-game, and should be understood. Shares can be distributed to players, making them shareholders. To issue shares the player can either take them from the corporation wallet, if there are any unassigned (owned by the corp), or a player with shares can give them to another player. This is also why as a CEO one of your first steps is to grab all the shares, so you can distribute them to who you want, while retaining shareholder majority.

Shares can do a number of things. First they allow the holder to vote in corporation votes. These may include making more shares (splitting) and voting on a new CEO if that vote is called. Votes can also function as a normal kind of multiple choice poll, or serve to lock and unlock original blueprints kept in corporation hangars. If the CEO decides to issue dividends to shareholders, your shares will get you money. Finally if a player has 5% or more of the shares for the corp they are in, they can force a vote for a new CEO. At this point all the shareholders will be called to vote, and the player with over 50% support wins.

Also be aware that having unissued shares is also a security risk. A corporation thief with Director access can take these shares, and if he has over 50%, vote himself to CEO and steal the corp. Conversely, a character holding more than the average shareholder (excluding any shares owned by the corp itself) can only be expelled via a vote. Characters with less shares can be kicked normally. A CEO without a majority of shares cannot hold their power, and this is a security measure which permits "temporary CEOs" to update a corporation with their skill level for membership cap increases.

War declarations

Wars are essentially when one corporation bribes CONCORD to look the other way while they and another corp duke it out. During a wardec, both corps will not take security hits for attacking members of the other corp nor will they be CONCORDokkened. There are some legitamate reasons for doing so. One is that two high-sec corps just wanna fight. Another is to attack another corp's logistical assests. And of course there is always wardeccing someone just to grief them.

The wardec cost depends on a few different things. There is a base price of 2 million for deccing a corporation and 50 million for deccing an alliance. If either the attacker or attackee have outstanding wardecs, then it gets a little more complicated. B x (N +1) X (W + 1) is the formula used then, with B being the base price, N being the number of wardecs the attacker has active, and W being the number of wardecs currently active against the attackee. Note that a corporation can only have 3 wars active at a time. This limit does not apply to alliances. Also the attackee can make the wardec mutual. At this point the weekly fee is revoked and will only end when the wardec is retracted or mutual status revoked.

War can end in a number of ways. First the attacker retracts it's wardec. It can do this at any time. Another way is for both CEOs to be in the same station. Finally the third way is from the attacker to not pay the weekly CONCORD bribe to extend the wardec. If any of these are choosen the fight will still continue thorugh a 24-hour "cooldown" phase.

The Inferno expansion added a mechanic that makes it easier for corporations to hire or contract allies to help them fight a war.


Corporations have standings, just like players. These fall into two categories, standings with other players and npc standings.

Player/corporation standings can be set just like when dealing with your own standings. This shows who your corporation likes and doesn't like. Changing corp standings doesn't let someone attack without CONCORD intervention, however it does let people know who is hostile to your corp. Corp player standings also allow you to manage what services will be availible to players in your stations, as well as who your POS guns will shoot at. Player standings are also used to show who you can and can't shoot outside of empire.

Corporation standings to NPCs are a collection of all the standings of all the players in the corporation. If all the players have high-standings with, say, Amarr Navy, then the corporation will have high standings with Amarr Navy. Also if only a few have high-standings but the rest of the corp has no standings (they haven't ever talked to one of their agents), the corp will have high-standings. These standings allow a corp member to purchase jump clones using the corp standing instead of his own personal standing. Corp standing is also important in order to be able to anchor POSs. The standing required to anchor a POS in a faction's territory is equal to the security status of the system up to 0.7 security. You cannot anchor a POS in higher security space.

Joining an alliance

Alliances are to corporations what corporations are to players. This means that alliances are groups of corps working together, although I use together loosely. Since multiple corporations are working together, they can pool their resources and do things they couldn't do alone i.e. 1000 man fleets, building supercapitals, holding null-sec, etc.

Any CEO with Empire Control V can make an alliance for 1,000,000,000 isk. Also after the alliance is formed there is a monthly maintence fee of 2,000,000 isk per member corp. This means that if the alliance has 10 corps the monthly fee is 20,000,000 isk. If this is not paid, the alliance automatically disbands.

Alliances are headed by the executor corporation. The executor is decided by the majority support of the member corporations in the alliance. Member corporations can support another corp for the executor corporation if they wish. The alliance system automatically checks if the executor has over 50% support. If he doesn't, he cannot use the admistrative controls until that support is restored or he is replaced.

Closing a corporation

Closing a corporation is simple. Just have everyone else leave or kick them out, then resign as the CEO. The corp closes automatically.

Class Wrap-up

  • Thanks for attending this class!
  • Questions ?